The Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission today made another appeal for a new stadium for the Vikings, saying the area needs the 8,000 jobs that would be created and noting that the poor economy has lowered the cost of a new stadium by $84 million. Now it’s proposed to cost $870 million, or twice what the Twins’ ballpark cost. The Twins play 81 games a year at home. The Vikings play seven. (Here’s the release)

In a 2007 push for a new stadium, the MSFC warned that if the Legislature waited until this year to approve a new stadium, the cost would increase by $41 million, to just under $1 billion.

The Commission also released new sketches of a proposed stadium…

I feel like I’ve seen that somewhere before.

Here’s the outdoor view of the proposed stadium.

We can now file these sketches with the sketches of past proposals for a new Vikings stadium.

About the blogger

Bob Collins has been with Minnesota Public Radio since 1992, emigrating to Minnesota from Massachusetts where he was VP of programming for Berkshire Broadcasting Co. He was an editor at the RKO Radio Network in New York, and WHDH Radio in Boston. He is the founder of the MPR News’ website. He is a private pilot and flies an airplane he built.

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We all know that the dome gets used many many times in a year apart from the Twins and Vikings. My question would be if this re-design of the stadium would still accommodate all those other uses, or would it in the end limit it’s flexibility?

bsimon

from MPR story:

“Vikings officials boycotted the hearing, and the team owners said they weren’t ready to endorse the plan and are keeping options open for building a stadium elsewhere in Minnesota.”

Sounds good to me, as long as they locate the stadium out of Hennepin county & stick the bill to the host county’s residents. I hear Anoka wants a stadium.

Zygi can keep his hand out of my pocket, thanks. I have other spending priorities.

david zuhn

The Twin Cities does not need the 8,000 construction jobs from building a stadium for $800 million dollars.

The Twin Cities could, however, use the jobs that $800 million would create if poured into necessary infrastructure for the entire community. Or spend the money on infrastructure statewide, and then spread the valuable jobs around.

It’s not as if there are 8,000 construction workers who only know how to build stadiums and are sitting with nothing to do. The out-of-work construction force can build anything they’re asked to do.

If the economic stimulus card is going to be played, the same amount of money spent on other projects is likely to create as many, or more, jobs and have a public benefit greater than for 70,000 people for 7 or 8 days a year.

How are the roads you drive on?

fasolamatt

OK, someone in Cleveland needs to dig through the files of “bad ideas of the 1980s” and pull up sketches of the “hexatron”, which the Cuyahoga County commissioners proposed in 1982 or so as a solution to the Cleveland stadium dilemna of the time. Those look like Crystal Cathedral too. Everything old is new again, I guess.

Joseph

It’s time for Keyboard Cat to play this stadium design off. And while it’s at it, maybe play off the entire push for a new stadium.

Oh, and thank you for the reference to the Crystal Cathedral. That was perfect!

Al

It’s great that they will create 8,000 jobs. If building this makes economic sense for the team to build it themselves then by all means, go ahead.

If you’re looking to create 8,000 jobs with public money (instead of the obvious choice of not spending the money in the first place considering the multi-billion dollar state deficit), shouldn’t we be looking to create those jobs on things the goverment is actually responsible for? You know, things that we have been cutting or underfunding like education, LGA, health programs for the poor, and transportation.

John P.

Businesses should stand or fall on the succes of their own business model. Public subsidies like tax breaks and this sort of nonsense are not in keeping with the principles of free enterprise. Studies of public benefit from pro sports seem tobe all over the map.

The public money would be far better spent on truly public projects, as many others here have opined. What’s so bad about going to a Gopher game, like people did before the Vikings? Maybe attendance at Gopher games would go up, and the U of M would benefit from the extra income. Are all of those Longhorn, Husker, Hawkeye, or Razorback fans so deprived?

I got over it when the Northstars and the Lakers left. I would get over the Vikings, Twins, Timberwolves or Wild as well.

Having said that, I sure am going to enjoy watching baseball at Target Field! Go Twins!

Ben W

Not that it really matters, but the Vikings actually play 10 home games a year (8 regular season, 2 preseason).

Al

So doing a little back of the envelop math:

They play at most 300 games in the new stadium (since clearly after 25 or 30 years the structure is completely unusable, or so we’re led to believe). So $870,000,000/300 = $2,900,000/game. I think I heard about 65,000 seats. So $2,900,000/65,000. This about $45/per ticket. This is part of the cost of doing business. Can the business afford to charge every fan that before condsidering employee salaries? This seems like a business model with crucial flaw.

I still cannot believe people out there are seriously pushing for the state to spend any amount of money to build a stadium for a private for-profit sports team, when there are thousands of people out there who cannot afford to eat or have a roof over their heads. That’s both disgusting and disappointing.